Online dating fees

Online dating or Internet dating is a personal introductory system where individuals can find and contact each other over the Internet to arrange a date, usually with the objective of developing a personal, romantic, or sexual relationship.

Online dating services usually provide unmoderated matchmaking over the Internet, through the use of personal computers or cell phones.

Other sites are more specific, based on the type of members, interests, location, or relationship desired.

A 2005 study of data collected by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that individuals are more likely to use an online dating service if they use the internet for a greater amount of tasks and less likely to use such a service if they are trusting of others.

The highest scoring dating service was Facebook, which uses the personal homepage genre, the message board genre, the weblog and directory genre, as well as utilizing the Circle of Friends.

The second highest scoring, Second Life utilizes virtual worlds, message boards, chat groups and profile pages to allow people to contact in a three-dimensional environment.

Users of an online dating service would usually provide personal information, to enable them to search the service provider's database for other individuals.

The dating services modeled on the free-at-the-point-of-use model scored much higher as many of them utilized the Circle of Friends social networking method and a wider number of online community genres.

A German documentary analyzed the market and uncovered multiple problems of online dating sites.

Amongst them are "romance-scamming" (persons registering on the sites to get money from people falling in virtual love with them), using controllers or animators registered with multiple fake accounts, using unexpected and sometimes unlawful conditions in the terms and conditions leading to longer contracts a client intended to sign.

Apart from the popular social networks, there are social websites meant just for meeting and talking to someone new.

3 popular and effective websites are: Plenty of Fish, Ok Cupid, and (where you can meet someone that has a similar taste in music as you).